Summary

"There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke." -- Vincent Van GoghThey were all wisps of smoke, smoldering in the crater of a great firestorm, and cradling the embers to start a new blaze.

Summary

Detective Bull Hissrad of the Val Royeux Police Department finally gets a break in the spate of bizarre deaths across the city: everybody who’s ended up six feet under bought a pet from the absurdly-named Magister D’s Pet Shop in Vintown, and the vint who runs the place is just strange enough to be worth checking out.

(Or, that time Bull was kind of a lonely, grumpy cop trying to figure out if Dorian was an ancient dragon hell-bent on exacting vengeance on humanity by killing people one at a time via the pretty inefficient method of selling them pets... or if he was just lonely and grumpy too.)

Summary

In which Dorian and Bull pick each other up at a club, Dorian's family disapproves, and Max and Krem think this is all a terrible idea right up until they don't. Dorian's father dies, Dorian's mother is cold, and Bull wonders how the hell he let himself get dragged into this (and then remembers: because Dorian).

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When I started writing this story, it was supposed to be fluff and angst of the "one-night stand that isn't" variety, with a side order of fake-relationship silliness. It was also supposed to be 10,000 - 15,000 words long. And then somewhere along the way, it became a story about two people with shitty pasts trying to figure out how to build a healthy relationship without any real template to work from.

Let's not even talk about the word count, and the only thing I'll say about the chapter count is that it's an estimate. At one point, we were ten chapters from the end for...uhhhh...about ten chapters. Barring a meteor hitting me in the head, I will finish this story, but I have absolutely no idea how long that will take, either in words or in months.